The FET-Open project NuClock aimed at creating a high-accuracy nuclear clock. Currently, interference from the environment (the atmosphere) is the main limiting factor for the accuracy of atomic clocks, but with nuclear clocks this interference is much lower and the accuracy can be orders of magnitude better. To reach this objective, the Technische Universität Wien coordinated an interdisciplinary consortium (comprising universities from Germany, Finland and Austria) that engaged in a 4-years research from June 2015 to May 2019.
Back in 2016, only one year after the start of the project, Nature, an international weekly journal of science, did already point out the possible upcoming development of a new time-measurement system. Recently, on 11 September 2019, the same journal, in its front page, again announced remarkable progress towards the realisation of the final goal NuClock worked at. Two extra Nature's papers ( from T.Masuda et al. and B.Seiferle et al.) have indeed reported about the adoption of new approaches in experiments dealing with Thorium-229 nucleus, whose transitional state has been found to be the ideal candidate to become the gold standard for timekeeping.
The struggle to measure the passage of time has challenged mankind for millennia, countless methods have followed the first rudimental devices, until the atomic clock was introduced in the late 1940s, promising to deliver an almost infallible measurement system. Over the last 70 years atomic clocks have been constantly perfected, but have also proved to be susceptible to perturbations of the environment, with consequences on the accuracy level.
The potential of the nuclear clock was identified in the early 2000s as an alternative much more resilient to perturbations. The NuClock project developed this technology and contributed with extra 15 peer-reviewed papers apart from those mentioned before. Despite a shared awareness of the many challenges still to be tackled, a growing optimism is encouraging efforts for further research, as scientists race to break this new frontier of timekeeping.
The realisation of a nuclear clock would not just be an advancement for science, but would entail striking effects on many sectors such as navigation, telecommunication, GPS signaling, high-speed mobile networks and even banks.
FET-Open and FET-Proactive are now part of the Enhanced European Innovation Council (EIC) pilot.